Nicknames have a random chance to appear and provide either a positive or negative to your ship, things like higher rate of fire or faster turnrate.

Certain government forms can influence how often you get a nickname and the engineering tech tree has 1 or two items for that stuff. If you want to check what a specific nickname does, head over to the design ship screen and select the design in question and at the bottom of the ship layout (bottom middle screen) you should see the name again and if you mouse over the name you get a tooltip providing a description and stats of the nickname in question.

Thanks a lot! Easy to find now that I know what I am looking for! Just hover the mouse over the nickname... really cool feature! And there are negative ones too? Wow.

Now if only I could figure out how to use my freighters...

Freighters? If you're building 'em you've got FTL Economics already. So build some civilian stations, construct their dock modules, then switch to 'trade' view and adjust the sliders for each colony between construction and trade, The more trade the less construction and ship-build times will increase in that system.

Depending on the size of the colony the slider will have a number of little notches showing how much trade a system can support. As you hit each notch you'll notice the Trade 'Dots' in the trade view get filled in. The triangles below the dots represent your freighters, small triangles are the ships themselves, the big surrounding triangle represents a civilian station trade dock.

You want to fill the available docks with freighters (you get more docks as you upgrade the civ station and build more modules) then adjust the trade slider till each filled dock has a filled trade dot above it. Remember to keep a system or two construction focused (preferably the ones with higher level naval stations) so you can still build ships quickly.

Trade can be reprioritised on a turn-by-turn basis too, so If you need a fleet fast just get all your systems back to construction and fire up the yards, when building is done re-prioritise trade.

If your smaller colonies can't even build freighters fast enough at any construction level, build some in your construction-focused systems and use relocation reserve transfers to send freighters where they're needed.

Police Cutters need to be prototyped and sent to each trade system's defense fleets in order to keep pirates in check, - 3-5 should do the job.

Might as well position them around the colony in the Battle Manager so they can shoot at meteors or whatever if needed.